Honestly - Analysis

The poem’s central move: refusing to join the field trip

At its heart, this poem stages a stubborn, funny resistance to being processed by a group story—the kind where everyone is sent out there, sorted into roles, and made to perform agreement. The opening offers a choice that isn’t really a choice: We could send you out there / to join the cackle squad. It sounds like a teasing invitation, but it carries social menace: laughter as discipline, a squad as conformity. Against that, the poem introduces an oddly specific holdout, the highly accomplished, / thinly regarded equestrian, who was going to join no one and Wouldn’t put his head on the table. That last image—refusing to lay one’s head down—feels like refusing humiliation, refusing sleep, refusing to be rendered harmless. The tone here is comic, but the comedy masks a real anxiety about being absorbed into the others’ outing, the others’ version of reality.

The hinge: But here’s the thing and the sudden arrival of dread

The poem turns hard at But here’s the thing: as if the speaker is dropping the banter to disclose what actually matters. What follows is not a clear narrative but a clear feeling: They had owned great dread. The verb owned is strange and telling—dread is treated like property, like an inheritance or a tool you can keep close. The route out is equally elemental and obscured: a way to get away from here / through ice and smoke. Ice suggests freezing, suspension, a world locked up; smoke suggests blur, misdirection, escape by disappearance. Even the intimacy in this passage is provisional: always clutching her fingers, like it says / to do. The tenderness of holding fingers is undercut by like it says, as if a manual is instructing them how to feel. A key tension sets in: the poem wants connection, but it can’t stop noticing how scripted connection can become.

From civic passion to pixel-yawning: a history that won’t stay stable

The middle section reads like a compressed autobiography of a culture—or of a mind—whose loyalties keep getting replaced. Once we were passionate about the police is jarring both for its bluntness and for how quickly it slides away. The next clause, yawned in the teeth of pixels, swaps public authority for screen-life boredom: the “teeth” image makes pixels feel predatory, yet the response is a yawn, a fatigue so deep it’s almost defiant. Then comes a vanishing act: a far rumor blanked us out. The phrase suggests being erased not by facts, but by distant, contagious talk—something you can’t quite locate, but that still wipes your presence. In that erased state, they bathed in moonshine, a gorgeous, corrupting image: moonlight becomes liquor, a wash of intoxication that’s also a kind of counterfeit illumination. The poem’s voice keeps switching from social satire to dream-report, but the underlying pressure stays consistent: what you believe in, what you look at, even what you are, can be replaced—too easily.

Experts disagree: the self outsourced to authorities

Another sharp turn arrives with Now, experts disagree. After dread, pixels, rumor, and moonshine, the speaker suddenly invokes authorities to adjudicate the mood: Were we unhappy or sublime? The absurdity is pointed—how could a panel decide whether an inner life was misery or transcendence? Yet the poem’s world keeps trying to formalize feeling into categories, to turn lived experience into a report. The proposed solution is delay: We’ll have to wait until the next time. And what they wait for is not evidence but visitation: an angel comes rapping at the door. Even joy is made obedient: they will rejoice docently. That last pairing is almost heartbreaking—rejoicing, but in a well-behaved way, as if happiness must be granted, supervised, and performed correctly.

A sharper question hiding in the obedience

If the angel has to rap at the door, does that mean the door is locked from the inside? The poem keeps presenting escape routes—through ice and smoke, through rumor, through moonshine, through revelation—but each one implies a cage: dread you “own,” instructions for holding hands, experts who get to name your state, an angel who must knock before you’re allowed to feel anything. The most unsettling possibility is that the speaker’s docility is not imposed, but practiced.

The last parenthesis: a private insistence under the comedy

The closing aside, (I know there’s a way to do this.), brings the poem into a more intimate key. It reads like a whispered correction to everything that came before: despite the squads, the experts, the docency, the speaker believes there is a method—some right action, some workable sincerity. But Ashbery’s phrasing matters: not to live or to escape, but to do this, as if the poem itself is the task: telling the truth without being absorbed into a cackle squad, reaching for sublimity without becoming obedient. The tone ends suspended between confidence and uncertainty—a small, stubborn claim of agency in a world that keeps trying to turn agency into a field trip.